2 | Playing the Taqiyya Card

Author Biography
Imam Omar Suleiman​ is the Founder and President of the Yaqeen Institute for
Islamic Research.

Dr. Nazir Khan​ is a physician, imam, and consultant for the Manitoba Islamic
Association's Fiqh (Religious Affairs) Committee.

Disclaimer: The views, opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in these

papers and articles are strictly those of the authors. Furthermore, Yaqeen does not
endorse any of the personal views of the authors on any platform. Our team is
diverse on all fronts, allowing for constant, enriching dialogue that helps us produce
high-quality research.

Copyright © 2017. Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research

3 | Playing the Taqiyya Card

Trust is a basic element for human beings to live together amicably in a multicultural
society. It is unsurprising then that propaganda that has driven societies towards
genocide often focuses on depicting a minority group as inherently dishonest and
dangerous. For instance, preceding the Rwandan genocide, the Hutus were told by
political figures that the Tutsi were a people full of hatred, dangerous, and dishonest.
1
Nazi propaganda prior to the Holocaust focused on repeating old stereotypes of
Jews as dishonest and untrustworthy in their dealings.2

As Dr. Wibke Timmermann astutely observes:

Hate speech regularly, if not inevitably, precedes and accompanies ethnic

conflicts, and particularly genocidal violence. Without such incitement to
hatred and the exacerbation of xenophobic, anti-Semitic, or racist
tendencies, no genocide would be possible and persecutory campaigns
would rarely meet with a sympathetic response in the general public.3

The contemporary Islamophobia industry has deployed the exact same stereotypes
in its characterization of the Islamic faith community and 1.6 billion Muslims. To
this end, words like “Shariah” and “Jihad” have been exploited by Islamophobes
who affirm the perverted meanings assigned to these terms by terrorists.
Meanwhile, mainstream Muslims believe that ​Jihad refers to a struggle undertaken
for the sake of God to protect the lives and rights of others, and that Shariah refers
to a divinely ordained system that enjoins treating all human beings in the best
manner. Islamophobes, when faced with this discrepancy between what they want
the words to mean and what mainstream Muslims believe they actually mean,
resort to a profoundly unsophisticated tactic – they simply declare all Muslims to
be compulsive liars.

1
​Mafeza, Faustin. (2016). Preventing genocide by fighting against hate speech. ​International Journal of Advanced
Research​, ​4​(3), 117-132.
2
​Jews in Nazi Berlin: From Kristallnacht to Liberation​.​ ​edited by Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon, Chana Schütz. p.
28.
3
Timmermann, Wibke (2008). Counteracting hate speech as a way of preventing genocidal violence. ​Genocide
Studies and Prevention: An International Journal​, ​3​(3), Article 8. Available at:
http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/gsp/vol3/iss3/8
4 | Playing the Taqiyya Card

Of course, that alone would be too obviously a fallacious maneuver, so in order to

cloak this move with some degree of credibility, Islamophobes claim that there is a
doctrine in Islam that teaches Muslims that they must lie to non-Muslims. This
doctrine is called ​taqiyya​. The presence of an Arabic word is guaranteed to dupe
people and send chills down the spines of well-meaning but woefully misinformed
patriotic Americans wary of those turban-wearing bearded foreigners, right? What
could possibly go wrong?

The Real Meaning of “Taqiyya”

The origin of this conjured term however is a ruling that permits a believer to
conceal his or her faith when under the threat of persecution or attack from forces
hostile to Islam (Qur’an 16:106, 3:28). The word literally connotes being ‘fearful’
(Lane’s Lexicon, p. 310),4 and in fact conveys a commonsense notion present
amongst all cultures and faiths – in a context in which someone is trying to kill
you or others because of your beliefs, it is appropriate to hide those beliefs.
Another famous example is Corrie Ten Boom lying to Nazis that she was hiding
Jews in her attic – no one with a moral conscience would fault her for lying to save
lives from murderous criminals.

Given that the word ​“taqiyya” has only been used in Islam to refer to Muslims
saving themselves from mortal danger by concealing their faith,5 that should
readily dismantle the Islamophobic claim that Muslims are generally taught to lie
to non-Muslims. However, when confronted with the fact that their use of the term
“taqiyya” is a grotesque misrepresentation, Islamophobes run to another concept
in an attempt to buttress their caricature of Muslims as dishonest criminals. They
cite a saying of the Prophet that “Warfare is deceit (Ar. ​khida’ah​).” But here again
they find no support as this reference to military strategy involving tricks has been

4
​Lane, Edward W., and Stanley Lane-Poole. ​Arabic-English Lexicon​. New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co, 1955. p. 310.
Accessed online at http://www.tyndalearchive.com/tabs/lane/
5
​Tafsir al-Qurtubi (4/57): “And Taqiyya is not permissible except with fear of death or loss of limb or tremendous
suffering.”
5 | Playing the Taqiyya Card

echoed by practically every civilization in human history. It is most famous on the

lips of Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu who stated in ​The Art of War, “All warfare is
based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable;
when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make
the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we
are near.” Once again, we find that behind the seemingly scary use of Arabic
jargon, there are nothing more than run-of-the mill commonsense notions that
every civilization has expressed.

Moreover, by unanimous consensus, Muslim scholars have explicitly pointed out

that tricking the enemy on the battlefield (​khida’ah​) is very different from
treachery (​khiyanah​) or breaking a covenant, the latter being universally
prohibited.

The lie that Islam condones lying

What Islamophobes who peddle the myth of ​taqiyya choose to ignore is that while
Islam permits believers to conceal their faith in the face of persecution, nowhere
does Islam grant Muslims general permission to lie with the intention of deception.
In fact, Islam strongly condemns dishonesty as a trait that is antithetical to true
faith in God, and a sign of hypocrisy.

Ayesha, the wife of the Prophet, said: “There was no behavior more hateful to the
Messenger of Allah than dishonesty. A man would lie when narrating something in
the presence of the Prophet and he would not be satisfied until he knew that he had
repented.”

Moreover, Muslims must be entirely honest and truthful when conveying the
teachings of Islam; the Qur’an states that one of the greatest evils is for a person to
lie about the teachings of Islam, inventing a lie against God (Quran 39:32).
6 | Playing the Taqiyya Card

Manufacturing hate against Muslims in America

Muslims have lived in the United States since its beginnings. We have established
mosques, schools, and institutions that have served the greater community. We are
socially, culturally, economically, and politically a well integrated community by
all measures, a community of proud Americans and proud Muslims who do not see
the slightest conflict between those identities. In the over 200 years that this
community has existed, never has there been an instance of the Muslim community
trying to overthrow the system. Not once has there been a mosque or an Imam
implementing an alternative set of laws. Not once has there been an instance of
Muslims promoting unconstitutional activities that would infringe on the rights of
our non-Muslim friends and neighbors.

In the current heightened climate of Islamophobia, a Texas state Representative

sent one of us (and other Muslim leaders) a loyalty test earlier this year to affirm
our American values.6 Instead of reaching out to us in the spirit of friendship and
understanding, he decided to put us through a litmus test that was grounded in
intimidation and suspicion. With over half a million Muslims in Texas, surely he
could’ve reached out to one of his Muslim constituents or visited a local mosque.
Instead, he chose to negate decades of interfaith dialogue, multifaith cooperation,
and civic engagement here in Texas. These loyalty tests are not new in America
and they essentially imply a second class citizenship on the part of those who
receive them. We reject that status and characterization. And just like the
“Anti-Shariah” bills that have passed in so many states, these political maneuvers
score cheap points with the fearful masses while having no effect on actual
regulation.

You can’t trust them. Some of them may be good, but too many of them have a
secret agenda. This is the type of racism that festered at both government and
community levels before, during, and after Executive Order 9066 which sentenced
almost 120,000 Japanese-Americans to internment camps. In one of the most

6
https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2017/01/26/letter-from-state-representative-angers-n-texas-muslim-leaders
7 | Playing the Taqiyya Card

shameful episodes in American history, a dangerous trend of anti-Asian attitudes

prevailed that obscured facts about the Japanese-American community and allowed
them to be brazenly exploited. This same chronicle has now found a home in
anti-Muslim bigotry.

The narrative is that the Muslim community is a discrete, unified group,

irrespective of nationality, age, or religiosity, all programmed to launch
“​civilization Jihad,” ​and incapable of an honest mainstream expression of its faith
that poses no threat to its neighbors. Islamophobes begin by defining and imposing
their definitions of Islamic terms (such as ​Shariah and ​Jihad​) in ways that fit the
above narrative, and then demand that Muslims reject the terms and texts as they
have portrayed them, or risk being deemed extremists for clarifying their
meanings. This puts Muslims in an impossible catch-22: Either reject the terms,
texts, and tenets of their faith to avoid persecution, or offer the mainstream Muslim
interpretation of these “problematic texts” and be accused of ​taqiyya.​

CONCLUSION

The tactic of dismissing everything that Muslims say or do that doesn’t fit the
Islamophobic narrative as "lying" has been remarkably efficient. This is the classic
"poisoning of the well" fallacy; if you can't beat the opposition with logic, then
destroy their credibility prior to them offering arguments and you'll never have to
debate them. Islamophobes complain that the word "Islamophobia" is a buzzword
to shut down criticism of Islam, arguing that they just want to have a critical
discussion on the subject. However, they use the term ​taqiyya in the very same
fashion to deny mainstream Muslims the right to express their own narrative which
represents the vast majority of Muslims worldwide. Think about how impossible a
situation this becomes: it may start with the falsehood that Muslims don’t condemn
terrorism, then when proof is put forth that they actually do (see
muslimscondemn.com), they’re told that they’re lying and concealing their true
intentions. So beyond the lie that all Muslims lie, is the reality that Islamophobes
8 | Playing the Taqiyya Card

actually aren’t concerned about any truths concerning the Muslim community or
Islam in the first place.